There’s been some discourse lately about Tilly Norwood, the AI generated actress, along with discussion of Gal Gadot’s AI movie. Given my open public stance opposing LLMs and my desire to be an intentional AI Luddite (to the extent that’s possible) I’m surprised to discover that my reaction to all this is…
I’m not too worried about it.
To be clear, AI performers, along with generated design elements, pose a significant threat to paying gigs for human beings. This has the potential to prevent many talented people from making a living. That’s a real problem and we should not support it.
But Tilly and her ilk will never pose a meaningful threat to the art and craft of acting. Acting, in its essence, is a method for human beings to explore our own nature. AI doesn’t change that in the least.
Acting is also a technique for storytelling, and the problem, for me, is that Tilly is an AI tool intended to tell human stories to human beings. But human beings want to tell our own stories: We don’t need AI to do that for us. I can see AI performers being a fad for a while, even I see how Tilly is weirdly fascinating, and the money people in entertainment may push them as a cost-saving measure (although the jury is still out on whether AI actually is cheaper, not to mention the environmental cost), but audiences are going to get bored with it. Something essential that many in our tech sphere don’t seem to understand is that most people want other people, and we always will. We don’t want machines doing people things for us. We want machines to do machine things, so we can do more people stuff.
This helps me find my way to heart of how I see the role of AI in art:
More than anything, I’m disappointed.
None of this is true artificial intelligence. LLMs are not, in any way, intelligent. They’re predictive text operating on a massive scale, cosplaying as AI. There’s no actual intelligence, no consciousness, no true sentience or self-awareness. The massive scale has yet to spontaneously generate conscious sentience, and I don’t believe it ever will. The whole structure is built on deeply flawed understanding of what intelligence is and how it actually functions.
Which means AI art isn’t true AI.
Imagine if true artificial intelligence did exist: sentient, self-aware, able to act with its own intention—I would love to see the art it would create! To see it develop its own craft of art to explore its own nature! To hear the stories it would tell about itself and its unique experience of the world! Art created by an actual non-human intelligence would be absolutely fascinating!
And I don’t believe it would pose any threat to human art: AI art would be AI representing itself, and human art would remain human. Our art would exist in dialog, referencing, influencing, playing off each other, exploring our relationship to each other. I would love to see that!
That’s not what any of this is. What we currently call AI art has no true intelligence or unique awareness behind it. It’s a tool that some people are using to remove human beings from the craft and work of creating human art.
This isn’t what most people want, and won’t ever be. People want other people, and our stories are ours to tell. We want to understand ourselves, not have some machine telling us who we are.
Tilly will never threaten that.
John the Librarian 